


Nightmares

by theoncomingwolf



Series: Carol Lives on Earth with M&M AND is a Space Superhero [2]
Category: Captain Marvel (2019), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Canon Compliant, Domestic Fluff, F/F, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, and visits space when she needs to periodically, learning about aliens is a lot to take in... if only maria had her gf back to help hmm?.... 00, please know this exists the universe I'll always write in where Carol rejoins her family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-11
Updated: 2019-05-11
Packaged: 2020-02-29 19:03:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18784270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theoncomingwolf/pseuds/theoncomingwolf
Summary: She’s been waking up like this almost every night since Carol left.Maria has given equal airtime to the whole slew of information that was dumped on her by her dead girlfriend, before the woman left to fight a space war. It’s frustrating, but not having anywhere to air these thoughts out during the day is really messing with her sleep.





	Nightmares

**Author's Note:**

> This fic got kind of long as I tried to hit all the pieces I wanted from this one-shot. I like how it turned out though. Enjoy!

Maria shudders awake, terror lingering in her chest, but mind clear.

 

It was just a nightmare, she tells herself, but she knew that, knew it before waking, almost.  


It’s still unnerving as shit.

  
Her bedside alarm clock fuzzily reads 3:22, lights melding together in her bleary eyes; Maria squints until she can see the black lines between the digits, and curses another night disrupted by these. 

  
She’s alright during the day; at the very least she can convince Monica everything’s fine, even with her daughter’s perceptive nature, but she’s been waking up like this almost every night since Carol left. 

  
Dammit, Carol.  


Maria tries not to think of how much better she’d sleep in her lost friend’s arms; she’s alive, but she’s not home, and if she recovered enough of her memory to realize what they were to each other before she left, she didn’t show it.  


Maria rubs her eyes to get the sleep dust out of them, a sign to herself that she isn't going immediately back to sleep, and pushes the pillows behind her before sagging against them. The headboard creaks under her weight, knocking lightly against the wall.  


She considers going to Monica’s room to ease her nerves, but she wills herself to pull it together.  


First off, the Skrulls were the good guys; she knows this.  


Tonight, however, her dreams conjured the memory of Monica, out in the yard with an exact replica of Maria herself. She’s had this one a few times in the past few weeks; last time there were two Monicas, the time before and Carol was a Skrull the whole time. This time, Maria watched helplessly through the window as her replica took advantage of her daughter’s trust to pull their weapon and...  


Maria gets out of bed.  


She gets out of bed, and she goes to Monica’s room, and she lays down beside her daughter.  


Monica blinks sleepily at her, smiling at the treat of having her mother come to her room in the middle of the night, as opposed to the other way around.  


Maria asks her what she dreamt about so far, and when Monica mumbles something about Power Rangers, she relaxes fully.  


She feels bad for subconsciously fearing the Skrulls in any way, and even though they truly convinced her that they were the victims, seeing Monica out in the yard with the shapeshifters Carol was telling her about scared her too much in the moment to be let go so easily. She thought her daughter was in danger, that’s bound to fuck a woman up.

  
They’ve not been the only nightmares she’s had recently anyway. She’s given equal airtime to the whole slew of information that was dumped on her by her dead girlfriend, before the woman left to fight a space war. It’s frustrating, but not having anywhere to air these thoughts out during the day is really messing with her sleep. 

  
It was the same when Carol died.  


Maria spent a lot of sleepless nights staring out the window, trying not to give credence to the thoughts raised in her nightmares, that Carol was alive, captured, in distress somewhere out there. Pretending she believed that Carol was dead was easiest, but with no body ever recovered- no remains at all- and a total classification of everything surrounding the crash, Maria couldn’t help but wonder.  


Monica had noticed Maria’s hesitancy to call Carol dead outright, and her young confidence that Carol was alive- not grasping the problems with that scenario- only exacerbated her inability to let the thought go.

  
She couldn’t speak about the worst-case scenarios to anyone, so they played out in her dreams, fairly often for months after the crash, and once in a blue moon for the next couple of years.

  
Carol ejected from her plane only to land injured in a remote area, alone and in pain; Carol landed safely but some enemy took her and disposed of the evidence by blowing the scene and leaving her dog-tags; their own forces took her and disposed of the evidence by blowing the scene and leaving her dog-tags; she was taken by the enemy and their own forces blew up the scene and covered up the evidence so people like Maria wouldn’t ask.

 

Maria knows now that Carol landed safely, blew up the plane herself, and was then captured by enemy forces; she knows now that the government was in fact covering something up, that they knew a lot more than they were letting on.

 

Those nightmares have come back, as a result.

 

Maria wants to ask Carol what it was like those 6 years, how much she remembers of Yon-Rogg taking her away before they brainwashed her into their personal weapon; she could never ask, anyway, even if Carol were here, so her nightmares fill in the gaps.

 

She dreams about what she heard on the blackbox, the clear sounds of Carol being shot at, the fainter sounds of Carol talking to Yon-Rogg before shooting the engine. She could only parse so much information from the unclear recording and the little information Carol gave her about her time on Hala, so the dreams are widely variable.

 

Carol knew Lawson’s blood was blue, so she must have been bleeding; was Carol, as well? Did she spend her last conscious moments in pain, bleeding out in the dirt while Yon-Rogg came to kill her? Maria thinks, when she wakes, that her voice sounded too clear for that, but the tightness in her chest doesn’t respond so quickly to rationality.

 

She heard Carol pause before shooting the engine; her dreams drew it out, lingered on the pause, made it longer, left the scene there for Maria to imagine, drawing together fuzzy visuals so she could relive the sound of her partner choosing to die to save others, in full color.

 

She dreamt of Carol on Hala, blending with real memories of the Kree on the ship.

 

They’d dragged her away to the ‘Supreme Intelligence’ to sort her out, manipulate her back into complacency, brainwash her once more. Maria imagined them doing the same to Carol, injured after the blast, but aware enough of what was happening to beg them not to, to let her remember her life, her daughter.

 

When Yon-Rogg had thrown Carol unconscious to the floor, restraining her with a glowing device, a gasp had torn from her throat; Fury’s steady gaze was the only thing stopping her from throwing herself towards the man. Maria dreamt of it happening to her Carol; not Vers, not Carol who glowed, who could take it, but her normal human girlfriend who learned of aliens the same moment they dragged her away.

 

Maria pulls her gaze away from the ceiling to watch Monica, who has drifted back to sleep. She watches the periodic rise and fall of her daughter’s chest, and listens to the faint sound of her even breathing, letting it lull her into dreamless slumber.

 

\---

 

“What do you think Auntie Carol is doing right now?”

 

Maria gently sets the bowl of Cheerios down in front of Monica, meeting her eyes inquisitively as she slides into the seat Carol had occupied a month prior while they caught up about the day of the crash.

 

Monica sits up a little straighter, excited to hear her mom bringing Carol up. Maria figures as long as she is thinking about what Carol is up to, she may as well give her daughter a space to talk about it too.

 

“Uhm, well I bet she and Talos have picked up at least 50 more Skrull families by now!” Monica says, sitting with her knees on the chair, hands planted on either side of her untouched cereal bowl.

 

“Your cereal is gonna get soggy, baby.”

 

Monica sits on her ankles and picks up her spoon.

 

“If the Krees try to mess with them,” Monica says, “I think she will just glow and they’ll run away, like they did on Earth.”

 

She takes a big bite of cereal, leaning over the bowl.

 

“Mm I bet,” Maria agrees, takes her unbroken eye contact as a sign that Monica wants her to speak, “and I think that they have found a _hundred_ Skrull families.”

 

Monica smiles, a goofy smirk with her mouth closed, full of Cheerios as it is.

 

“And knowing your Auntie Carol,” Monica says, thinking more seriously about what she thinks the other woman is up to, “she’s gotten herself mixed up in at least one thing that she didn’t intend to.”

 

“Like what?” Monica asks.

 

Back when Carol was a normal Earth woman, she found herself in an unnecessary amount of conflict. Usually, it was because she was directly provoked, because people did not like in women what Carol had to offer; her overconfidence, direct nature, the way she reserved her smiles for those who she thought deserved them constantly had her at odds with men. It generally only led to bad-mouthing behind her back, or less friendly interactions, but occasionally it culminated in something worse.

 

Maria could usually shake her out of most intense stare-downs by pulling her aside to do something more fun; Carol’s first choice when jackasses came to harass them was to make unwavering eye-contact, challenging them while she processed what she could retort with- because Carol could never just leave it alone. If Maria came closer to her with a casual hip-check and rolled her eyes, it was enough to diffuse the situation and get her to walk away.

  


It didn’t always work out so well though.

 

There was the time in high school where she ended up with a broken nose and a split lip after getting cornered alone by a couple of loser dudes who she had been arguing with during school hours; her brother- who had come by to pick her up- arrived just in time to allow Carol to get a good punch in as she pushed herself off the floor and ran past him, re-starting the fight so everyone ended up a little bruised.

 

There was the time she physically grappled with a man at a bar who wouldn’t leave a woman alone, until several people stepped in to pull the two apart and remove the man from the bar.

 

There was the time when she launched herself at a guy they knew from boot camp after he’d said something about Maria; Carol ended up curled in a tight ball from the punch to her gut, and Maria had to tell her to never fucking do that again. It wasn’t cute, it wasn’t noble. Carol got the message; she didn't try to fight anyone again, limiting her responses in similar situations to a less reactive, unfazed brush-off, as much as it pained her to do so.

 

Maria thinks that if the Carol she knew encountered conflict, then _this Carol_ \- this stronger, unbalanced Carol who couldn’t remember the lessons she’d been taught in life- was bound to get herself into trouble.

 

“She’ll probably end up trying to help more people than just the Skrulls,” Maria says, trying to vaguely express her feeling that Carol’s gonna deck a random alien for their behavior toward a stranger and start an intergalactic barfight.

 

“That’s good,” Monica says, staring into her bowl, “but I hope she doesn’t take too long to come back.”

 

\--

 

Carol comes home two weeks later.

 

It’s the evening, and Maria and Monica are sitting out on the front porch, enjoying the cool night air. Monica leans against Maria’s toned arm, holding her elbow loosely in one hand as she tells her about their science projects at school.

 

She pauses her story, bringing up her opposite hand to point into the sky, dark, and cloudless, and filled with an impossible number of stars. A bright blur streaks across the night sky, looking almost like a shooting star until its trajectory shifts mid-flight.

 

Carol drops in front of them, her whole body lit brightly. Her glowing eyes meet Maria’s, who feels the same wonder she did on the ship, when she looked up from the floor to the surreal vision of her ethereal partner.

 

Monica launches herself at Carol, shrieking in excitement. Maria sits, firmly rooted to the front porch.

 

Carol allows Monica to hug her, but does not move, does not break eye contact with Maria.

 

Her eyes are still glowing.

 

She moves closer; her body language is not that of the Carol she knows, strong and confident until she’s around her girls, melting into something inviting and gentle.

 

Her shoulders are fully back, head held high as she peers down at Maria.

 

Her eyes are still glowing.

 

Maria shakes herself out of it, forcing herself to her feet so she can set reassuring hands on each of Carol’s shoulders.

 

Carol’s eyes stop glowing.

  
Carol stops glowing.

 

Carol crumples to the ground, lifeless, the light leaving her eyes in more ways that one as she stares, glassy-eyed, up at the night sky.

 

Hundreds of thousands of stars, pinned into the jet-black sky, silhouette Maria as she drops to her knees, shaking Carol ineffectually before bowing, burying her head in her dead girlfriend’s chest, urging her to get back up-

 

\--

 

Maria snaps awake, tight abs bringing her quickly into a sitting position. She clenches her fingers around the covers on her lap, shoulders up to her ears, and blinks until her vision clears from sleep.

 

Just a nightmare.

  
Just another fucking nightmare.

 

\--

\--

 

When Carol _actually_ comes home, it is 2 and a half months after she left.

 

It’s the middle of the day, and Maria doesn’t even notice her land.

 

She’s sitting outside with a mystery novel her mom has been onto her to read, killing time until she needs to pick Monica up, having gotten as much done with the plane in the back as she was going to for the moment.

 

The book is just getting good. The protagonist, a clever young woman with bad judgement and good looks, has snuck her way into an exclusive club frequented by her main suspect. The fact that a woman wrote this book feels obvious in the descriptions of the character’s dressed-up disguise, and the way she interacts with the men around her while she tries to avoid unwanted attention. The air of danger around the protagonist grows as small descriptions dropped through the text foreshadow an imminent appearance of the villain.

 

Maria doesn’t hear the soft footsteps on the grass.

 

The character doesn’t notice the man stalking her across the room.

 

“What-cha reading?” Carol asks.

 

Maria drops her book onto the ground; she loses her page; she doesn’t care.

 

Carol, who has crept around from the back of the house, stands sheepishly on her lawn. She’s wearing the same red and blue flight suit she had on the last time, but no jacket.

 

“If you lost that damn jacket,” Maria says, “Monica is going to cry.”

 

Damn. She hadn’t really meant that to be her first words.

 

Carol holds two gloved hands up, smiling that wide, crinkly-eyed smile that Maria missed so much.

 

“It’s in my bag,” she says, “around the back.”

 

The smile fades from her face as her hands lower back to her sides, clenched into loose fists. She’s staring at Maria like she's trying to make up her mind about something; she makes an attempt to play off her nervousness with a smile, but she doesn’t realize how well Maria knows her.

 

Carol doesn’t move as Maria crosses the lawn to meet her, just watches her approach and tries to shape her face into something more casual. She doesn’t initiate a hug, but the second Maria’s arms are around her neck, Maria finds strong arms around her waist, pulling her close as Carol buries her face into Maria’s shoulder.

 

Just as Maria is about to pull away, Carol holds tighter, turning her body suddenly so the tips of Maria’s boots brush airily through the grass, feet no longer planted on the ground.

 

She wants so much to throw her legs around Carol’s waist, to slide her fingers under the curve of her jaw and kiss her firmly while Carol holds her in her strong arms.

 

She shouldn’t. Not on the front lawn. The neighbors could see.

 

Carol puts her down, catching Maria’s elbows in her hands before she can step away;  her fingerless gloves are soft, and they leave her fingers open to press gently into Maria’s arm.

 

“I’ve missed you,” she says, eyes wide and sincere.

 

Fuck the neighbors.

 

Maria resists the urge to kiss Carol, to avoid making a scene in front of her house, but also in case she’s misinterpreting the familiar look in her old friend’s eyes.

  
“Come on,” Maria says, voice barely coming out loud enough to be heard, and leads Carol into the house.

 

Maria nudges Carol inside, leans backwards against the door as it shuts. She crosses one ankle over the other, one hand still wrapped around the doorknob, back against the wood.

 

She watches Carol as she slowly turns to face her. She says nothing, wonders how her old friend will interpret the look in _her_ eyes _._

 

Carol gets it right.

 

Her lips are soft, and her hands move familiarly to Maria’s waist and the back of her neck, the first place they always used to settle when Carol kissed her.

 

\---

 

They’re late to pick up Monica.

 

It’s not _too_ late, only 15 minutes- Carol might have driven a little over the speed limit before they hit the school zone- but Monica doesn’t mind.

 

Carol exits the car to pick up the excited girl, swinging her around in a tight hug that takes her completely off her feet. She juggles Monica in her arms, settling her into a princess carry and beaming.

 

She’s back in civvies- a pair of jeans, a tee-shirt, and her old leather jacket. Loose tendrils of her hair, which have fallen from her messy bun, float around her face, framing her wide smile. She looks so beautiful; especially with her happy daughter in her arms.

 

“Get in the car you two,” Maria calls out, rubbing a hand over her brow as she spots a curious teacher peering across the courtyard; it’s innocuous, really, Carol with Monica, but old habits die hard, and Maria doesn’t like people thinking too hard about their family situation.

 

Carol loads a giggling Monica into the backseat, tossing her across the three seats and shutting the door after nudging her feet fully in. Monica wiggles into a sitting position, leaning between the driver’s and passenger’s seat as Carol slides back into the car.

 

“Buckle your seatbelt,” Carol says, before Maria has a chance.

 

\--

 

Carol doesn’t remember everything, but it’s a good start.

 

They’d spent the half hour before they needed to pick up Monica establishing where Carol was, at this point. Now that she was away from the Supreme Intelligence, she’d recovered enough memory- clear ones, not entirely disjointed and confusing- to tip the scales firmly away from amnesiac Kree Vers into amnesiac human Carol, who couldn’t remember the entire context for the memories she had, but knew enough to piece together the biggest themes in her life.

 

She couldn’t remember how she and Maria first got together, but she knew they _were,_ and she knew she missed her; she couldn’t remember exactly how long she’d been whatever she was to Monica, but she knew that the thought of missing 6 years of the young child’s life hurt her so strongly that she couldn’t bear to miss another.

 

She’ll have to go back sometimes, she told Maria, maybe even a lot, but if Maria would help her figure out where she should be when she's on Earth... Maria answered with a kiss.

 

\--

 

Dinner is good.

 

Maria makes a favorite meal of Carol’s, noting to herself as, during cooking, she hands her a spice that Maria has yet to request. Monica sits on the counter, kicking her feet against the wood of the cabinets until Maria snatches an ankle on its way up to get her to stop; she braces her hands against the counter to avoid slipping, and Carol laughs at the both of them in a relaxed way that makes joy spike through Maria’s chest.

 

Carol tells them about space, about working tirelessly to find Talos’ party a planet to reside on and the means to find and collect other Skrulls from the rest of the galaxy. While he focused on the find and rescue side, Carol played intimidation, finding and wrecking as many Kree military outposts as she could to send a clear message.

 

Monica peppers her with questions as they sit to eat, which Carol answers in the way you answer an 11-year-old who wants to know more about space war.

 

She pries their daughter off the subject by telling them both about the coolest shit Maria has ever heard.

 

Maria ignores her food, too focused on Carol’s descriptions of busy marketplaces _in space,_ of a glittering night sky with two moons above on a purple planet _in space,_ aliens who look enough like Chewbacca from Star Wars that Carol rudely forgot what their species was actually called.  She stuffs another bite of rice in her mouth, starting a story about a stolen spaceship.

 

“Don’t chew with your mouth open!” Monica says, accusingly, then shifts her gaze to her mother.

 

Maria picks up her fork.

 

\--

 

Having Carol back is so easy.

 

She fits right back into their lives in the first few hours of being back; she’s so good with Monica, and she makes Maria laugh like she hasn’t in years, the kind that makes her throw her head back helplessly. Carol has always been wickedly funny, and Maria has always delighted in getting reactions back from her that no-one else could.

 

Sometime over the course of the night, Monica ends up in Carol’s lap, wrapped up in her strong arms. It’s a contest, Maria thinks, to who looks the sleepiest- if they weren't sitting upright in wooden dining chairs, they'd have probably already fallen asleep, though Monica still might in her new seat.

 

Neither of the two of them is going to call it quits first, determined to spend time with the other, so Mom’s gotta step in.

 

“Alright,” Maria says, smiling fondly at her family, “let’s get to bed.”

 

“Nooo,” Monica whines, leaning in towards Maria before slumping back hard into Carol’s chest, defiance written all over her face, “I don’t want to go to school tomorrow, Mom...”

 

Carol squeezes Monica tighter, unfazed by the 11 year old’s potentially painful movements, and makes puppy dogs over the girl’s shoulder, “she doesn’t want to go to school, Maria.”

 

“Oh stop it,” Maria says, “of course she isn’t going to school tomorrow; you just got back.”

 

The both of them cheer, and Maria shakes her head, laughing at Carol’s purposefully over-the-top behavior. She’s always acted very silly around Monica.

 

With confirmation that she’ll have more time tomorrow, her sleepy daughter slides off Carol’s lap and turns, throwing her arms around her shoulders and sneaking a quick kiss onto her cheek before scurrying upstairs to get ready for bed.

 

Carol watches watches her go, body turned away from Maria.

 

Maria finishes her beer, while Carol holds hers to her thigh, seemingly unmindful of the condensation from the bottle soaking into her jeans. Maria gives her the space to decide what she wants to do next, even if that is fall asleep in the uncomfortable wooden dining chair and clean a broken beer bottle off the floor.

 

“Thank you,” Carol says, finally, turning her sleepy eyes on Maria.

  
She opens her mouth, as if to explain, but brings the bottle to her lips instead, standing as she drains the rest of the beer.

 

“I meant you, too,” Maria tells her, “you need to shower before you’re laying down anywhere, though.”

 

Carol blinks at her, bringing the clean t-shirt she’d put on to pick up Monica from school to her nose.

 

She shrugs, hopefully- hopefully- considering that she has just come back from space and that the smell of Maria’s t-shirt on her body is not the deciding factor in whether or not she needs to shower.

 

Maria walks Carol upstairs, collecting towels and pajamas and not talking about where Carol is going to sleep when she gets out of the shower. She knows where she _wants_ Carol to sleep, and it’s not as if they have another bed. She could get a blanket for the couch, just in case, or offer to sleep on the couch herself, letting their weary traveler have her own bed for the night, but she worries if she brings up the couch at all, Carol will feel like Maria wants her there.

 

So she says nothing, watches Carol step into the bathroom, and sits anxiously on the edge of her bed for 10 minutes. She puts her wig away, takes off her socks, removes her bra. Sits back down. Waits.

 

Carol eventually appears in the doorway, dressed in the blue pajama pants and grey t-shirt that Maria lent her. She’s not wearing a bra, but makes no effort to pull on her shirt so it clings less tightly to her breasts. It’s cute, Maria thinks; she’d missed these little visuals of Carol that she couldn’t find in a photograph once she was gone.

 

“You goin’ next?”

 

Maria pulls her shirt up to her nose and smells it, not breaking eye-contact.

 

Carol laughs, knocking lightly against her shoulder as she passes. Maria walks into the bathroom as Carol heads to say goodnight to Monica.

 

Her towel is still folded by the edge of the sink, seemingly unused. Fire hands- fire body- Maria guesses. Weird, and she should probably just use a towel anyway, but she’ll take whatever Carol she’s got back.

 

Carol is sitting on the opposite side of the bed when Maria returns with Carol’s unused towel wrapped around her chest. She hasn’t pulled the covers back, but she’s had to walk all the way around to choose to sit there, so Maria feels a spark of excitement that she might stay after all.

 

Carol watches Maria silently as she drips over to her drawers. She turns towards the window, but does not try to leave the room or overtly look away.

 

Maria drops the towel onto her dresser, and puts her pajamas on. There’s no good place to turn away anyway, standing in front of the mirror as she is, so she changes like she would were she alone, or like she would in front of her girlfriend.

 

She sits next to Carol when she’s done, wrapping her fingers around the loose fist Carol has in her covers.

 

“Ready to sleep?”

 

“Yeah,” Carol says, “here... good?”

 

“Here’s great.”

 

Carol nods. Her brows are furrowed together, but she’s smiling.

 

“Thanks,” she says again, “for- for letting me come back... just like this.”

 

“Thanks for coming back.”

 

Maria takes her jaw gently, and presses a soft kiss to the side of her mouth, before getting up to close the door and switch the lights off. She lays down, watching as Carol does the same. She’s left room between them, but it doesn’t feel uncomfortable.

 

“I don’t know how you feel about me,” Maria says, “compared to how you used to- and you might not either- but please know my feelings for you have not changed. You are still my best friend in the whole world, as you have always been. I’d like to have you back in my life in whatever way you want, whenever you want.”

 

“I don’t know what I want,” Carol whispers, “but being here feels good.”

 

“Then stay,” Maria whispers.

 

“Kissing you feels good,” Carol tells her, a familiar smile on her face.

 

“Then kiss me,” Maria laughs, “please.”

 

She kisses her, and she stays, and she inches closer to Maria, nudging her until she turns towards the door.

 

She falls into a peaceful sleep, pulled tight to Carol’s chest.

 

\--

 

Maria wakes up at 3AM.

 

She curses to herself as she squints at the clock, trying to remember what nightmare has woken her tonight. She tries, but she can’t remember dreaming at all.

 

Maria throws a look over her shoulder, groggily confirming that Carol did come home after all. She feels relief at the sight of Carol laying beside her, until she registers that her eyes are open, wide and watery, fixed on the ceiling.

 

“Carol?” Maria asks, gently.

 

“Sorry,” Carol whispers, glancing over briefly before rolling completely away, setting her feet on the floor, “go back to sleep.”

 

She stands, one hand clasped over her chest, and staggers around the side of the bed, making a beeline for the door.

 

Maria throws the covers off, following her out into the hall and down the stairs.

  
“Carol,” she whispers, careful not to wake Monica and upset Carol further, “what’s wrong?”

 

“I- I just can’t sleep.”

 

Maria leans against the fridge as they enter the kitchen, watching her girlfriend pace.

 

“Nightmares?”

 

Carol shrugs, staring at her feet.

 

“I’ve been getting them a lot while you were gone,” Maria admits, knowing getting Carol to open up can require a two-way road, “about you, mostly; worrying about you.”

 

“I’m sorry.”

 

“Don’t be,” Maria says, “but if you want to tell me about yours, I’m happy to listen.”

 

She hesitates to say she gets it, fearing that she may really not.

 

Carol bites her lip, leaning against the wall.

 

“I’m not sure they’re nightmares,” she says.

 

Maria cocks her head, eyebrows tight, “memories?”

 

Carol nods.

 

“I’ve been getting them for years... 6 years,” she says, “some definitely weren’t real, like my mind was trying to balance the memories that slipped through against what the Kree made me believe was true. Like it took the little bits of memory that I did have and built a story around it so it made sense...”

 

Maria steps away from the fridge.

 

“I dreamt of the crash a lot, but Skrulls were attacking us, not Yon-Rogg- I think the Supreme Intelligence edited that memory specifically,” Carol says, “but I also dreamt of you, sometimes, and Monica. They weren’t very clear memories, but I was sure you were someone from my old life; I just assumed you’d died in whatever Skrull attack I thought had taken my life from me.

 

“Even after I figured out what happened, these last couple months I can’t really tell what is real and what’s just dreams. I had a pretty good dream about kissing you at some point, but I couldn’t tell if that was just something I wanted to do,” Carol laughs.

 

Maria smiles, brows still furrowed sadly.

 

“What was tonight’s?”

 

Carol’s fists tighten, exposing her ankles as she pulls on her pajama pants.

  
“It was uhm,” she stares angrily at the ground, and Maria sees a flash of light flicker over her hands, “Yon-Rogg, and Minn-Erva; I had remembered something important. I don’t know what it was now, but I told them about it, ‘cause they were my friends, and I thought they’d want to know I was getting better and remembering things.

 

“Yonn-Rogg told me it might have been fake, that I’d been through trauma, but I knew it was real, and I thought it might be the key to figuring out what happened to me. He told me to talk to the Supreme Intelligence, to see if she could help. We argued, when we got there, 'cause whatever I had remembered was making me suspicious.”

 

Carol’s hands flicker brighter. She lets go of her pants abruptly, and they darken.

 

“And?” Maria prompts stepping in front of Carol, although she’s pretty sure she knows the ending.

 

“I felt like I'd been electrocuted... the chip, I think. It was only _supposed_ to be there so I didn't blow anything up by mistake, it wasn't supposed to hurt me. Then they dragged me inside and... she- it- the Supreme Intelligence made me forget again.”

 

Maria wraps Carol in a tight hug. Carol buries her face in her neck, and Maria can feel a drop of wetness roll over her collarbone. She breathes carefully, blinking slowly to avoid spilling her own tears.

 

“It might just be a nightmare,” Carol says, voice tight with anger, “I really don’t know.”

 

“Yeah," Maria agrees, though they both know it probably happened; she's furious as well, but Carol needs comfort right now.

 

Carol pulls away, leaning back against the wall, head bowed.

 

“Thank you for telling me. I'm so sorry you don't know with this,” Maria says, “but if you ever need to sort out any of your Earth memories, I've got you."

 

“Thanks... I’m glad.”

 

She takes a deep breath, patting her hands against her thighs as she lets go of her pants.

 

"That might be kind of nice right now."

 

“Well, I think that one of us kissing was real,” Maria offers.

 

“Oh?” Carol says, smirking, “what about this other dream I have where we parked up on a hill after a movie and you took your shirt off the back of my Mustang?”

 

“Mm, I took more than my t-shirt off,” Maria laughs, shyly, though she thinks Carol knows.

 

“Oh,” Carol repeats, smiling coyly, “you’ll have to fill me in.”

 

She rubs her eye with the back of her hand, obviously still deeply tired from traveling all the way back to Earth.

 

“Well, _your_ shirt, for starters,” Maria says, pulling Carol away from the wall, “I can tell you about it any time, but maybe if you go to sleep now, you can dream the rest of that date. It was a good one.”

 

They head upstairs and get back into bed, Maria facing towards Carol this time to pull her against her.

 

“Help me out here,” Carol says, head twisted towards Maria as she scoots in sideways, too occupied by continuing their conversation to get into a position that works for spooning, “get me started, what happened first?”

 

Maria rolls her eyes, takes Carol’s face in both her hands, and shows her.

**Author's Note:**

> I plan to write more Danbeau family fics.
> 
> If you liked it, please consider leaving a review to help with my motivation. :)
> 
> Thanks!


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